Category: Music

So, I’m an old man. I love soundtracks from games from older consoles. While yes, you can get mp3s or stream the soundtrack from YouTube, in my opinion the best way is to listen to the original files.

I don’t pretend to know how it all works, but talented people can take the game music out of console games into a native-ish format. When you listen to it, the codec basically perfectly recreates the synth/music. For Super Nintendo, it’s the spc file. For Playstation 1 and 2, it’s a combination of minipsf/psf/psf2 files.

Anyway, I have lots of these original soundtracks. In my Windows OS days long, long ago I would load up WinAmp with all kinds of output plugins to play these kind of media files. Good times.

Then, for various reasons I started using Apple products. There is no WinAmp for OSX, and I could find no way to play my soundtracks of choice. I sighed, grumbled, and moved on.

Then! Then! Like 10 years later I’ve figured it out, and it’s super simple. Audacious is an open-source audio player, and it supports all these older codecs no problem. When you go to their site, it isn’t obvious that there’s a way to get it to run in OSX, but there is.

You’ll need to have Homebrew installed, but you probably should anyway because it’s super helpful. Then it’s just a matter of: